Ab­b­Vie tees up a biotech buy­out af­ter siz­ing up their Parkin­son's drug spun out of Ke­van Shokat's lab

Ab­b­Vie has teed up a small but in­trigu­ing biotech buy­out af­ter look­ing over the pre­clin­i­cal work it’s been do­ing in Parkin­son’s dis­ease.

The com­pa­ny is called Mi­tokinin, a Bay Area biotech spun out of the lab of UCSF’s Ke­van Shokat, whose sci­en­tif­ic ex­plo­rations have formed the aca­d­e­m­ic ba­sis of a slew of star­tups in the biotech hub. One of Shokat’s PhD stu­dents in the lab, Nicholas Hertz, co-found­ed Mi­tokinin us­ing their lab work on PINK1 sug­gest­ing that amp­ing up its ac­tiv­i­ty could play an im­por­tant role in reg­u­lat­ing the mi­to­chon­dr­i­al dys­func­tion con­tribut­ing to Parkin­son’s dis­ease patho­gen­e­sis and pro­gres­sion.

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